Everything We Could Not Keep

Elsbeth Ciesluk, Eva Spierenburg

work on paper, paintings, three dimensional work, video

23 July – 20 August 2017

2- 19 August by appointment only: 0031.70.3640151 or info@mauritsvandelaar.nl
Sunday 20 August Finissage from 1 – 5 pm

During her studies at the Rijksakademie Amsterdam, Eva Spierenburg (1987) departed from painting and started to create more and more spatial works. The paintings have transcended their frames to evolve into installations with painted objects, sculptures, drawings, photographic prints and video. Her work is intensely personal: “It is a collection of attempts to comprehend life and death, to materialize absence, to chase away fears without avoiding them, to incorporate my own body, to find strength in vulnerability.” For instance, she made a skin-toned costume from canvas; a male alter ego she used to imitate the postures of the men in her paintings. Dreams also play an important role, with the human body embedded in a protective environment as a recurring theme. In her most recent work the body is reduced to skin: cloths painted in skin tones are hung on the wall and suspended freely in the room and represent the boundary between the individual and the world.

For Elsbeth Ciesluk (1986) vulnerability and one’s relation to the world are also recurring themes. Language plays an important role in her work. She preferably uses a typewriter to produce texts that are both very direct and enigmatic to express her sense of amazement as well as her struggle with the imperfections of the world. Like Eva Spierenburg she incorporates images from dreams that give her work a mysterious and sometimes humorous undertone. Apart from texts, Ciesluk makes large drawings and paintings on paper and textiles featuring animals that are represented in a rudimentary way that express both power and vulnerability. In the exhibition she has produced a large walldrawing together with clusters of textworks in response to Eva Spierenburg’s work that is placed more freely in the gallery.

See reportage by Albertus Pieters on villanextdoor